zetar:In the 'old days' poorly written code would cause almost an immediate crash

No, in the old days you'd end up stomping all over memory and not knowing a damned thing about it until something started acting weird because your code finally got around to using the part of the stack that you trashed, or a return vector was filled with garbage, or something like that. Nowadays we have formerly mainframe-level features in even the cheapest CPUs that result in a core dump or other immediate feedback when you're careless, and even when you are careless you don't end up taking the whole machine down like you did in the past because the OS can isolate you and tell you specifically where you farked up via a handy stack dump.

/remembers the fun debugging TSRs and interrupt handlers in assembly back in the old DOS days

Rwa2play:RichieLaw: Just do it man. Everything is so cheap now. I was able to get a 120 gig SSD on Newegg for less than $100 and use that as my boot drive. WIN7 runs like a freakin dream.

Certainly is in my plans for the next 12 months or so: Buy a 120 or 256 gig SSD and install Win 7 on it, then move most of my other programs on my current HD to that SSD.

And I would skip the 8-core. Unless you're going to be running a home server or something anything more than 4-core's is a waste right now. (I just bought my 6-core because it was super cheap and was the best value for the money at the time). If I had to do it all over again I would buy this CPU as you can't go wrong with a quad-core 3.4 GHZ that can easily be OC'd with stock cooling to close to 4 GHZ.

Well that merits a question: wouldn't it be a benefit if you have a multi-core processor while you have a browser (like Chrome) and running/looking at 15-20 pages at the same time?

I honestly would go to the six-core processor since I won't buy a new rig for a long time. If I can get a little more efficiency running an 8-core processor I would do it.

Re the SSD: Go 256 GB. It's like $100-$150 different, but since Windows bloats up to about 30, and your hibernate file is another [however much RAM you have, so 32 GB here*], and Windows likes having free space to cache stuff in, by the time you get your programs installed you have no room for files. Whereas 256 lets you sneak most of your files, a couple video games, a bunch of programs, a few Linux VM's over in the corner for schoolwork, and still have some free space.

Re the processor: Right now, Bulldozer is terrible for end users. Either invest in one of the K-series from Intel, or stick to the Phenom X4. Just because you have 8 cores doesn't mean you're always using 8 cores, because you don't always have 8 things to do at any given time.

*Note: I am in school. My personal record is 43 GB of combined RAM and swap space for a single program. They gave us a 3 GB input file with about a half a million nodes and about 100 million links, and told us to run page rank. It took like 37 hours to run. Once I'm out of school, I'll drop back to a more sane 8 or 16.

cgremlin:zetar: In the 'old days' poorly written code would cause almost an immediate crash

No, in the old days you'd end up stomping all over memory and not knowing a damned thing about it until something started acting weird because your code finally got around to using the part of the stack that you trashed, or a return vector was filled with garbage, or something like that. Nowadays we have formerly mainframe-level features in even the cheapest CPUs that result in a core dump or other immediate feedback when you're careless, and even when you are careless you don't end up taking the whole machine down like you did in the past because the OS can isolate you and tell you specifically where you farked up via a handy stack dump.

/remembers the fun debugging TSRs and interrupt handlers in assembly back in the old DOS days

I wrote a lot of games in the '80s and '90s and space was so tight you crashed hard and fast.

Software companies are continually researching and developing newer, more complex and more advanced applications for us to use. As this occurs, hardware must also evolve to allow us to use the new programs. You'll never notice a change in time because there will always be an equilibrium. That is, until we move beyond our current computing systems and adopt something better.

I dont buy this shiat about programmers sucking these days. They always sucked. But operating systems are getting more and more integrated bs so basic operations have way too much overhead. But if there's one place I buy the sucky programmer theory it's threading. No matter what the OS it seems more stuff is being done in the same thread so that the UI becomes unresponsive, even if just for that app. E.g. Outlook can't move an email because it's waiting on some disk cache to render some horrible HTML crap so instead of moving it it has to load it first which is stupid.

I haven't used Un*x desktops much in a few years so I don't know if that's different. But I do suspect some clever aging out of older hardware is going on.

ok I will jump in with my take on things. Yes, hardware is faster, much, much faster. The programmers ARE lazy. When I first started out programming in the late 60's early 70's I went from SWIFT to BASIC to ASSEMBLY. True programmers who want tight efficient programs use ASSEMBLY. Yes it is a pain to program in and even more of a pain to debug but the programs are 80% smaller than using C, C++ etc. Programmers wanted that ability to program in a language that was closer to "English" than binary. ASSEMBLER programmers had to know hexadecimal and dang near binary. Languages got easier to use, but the down side is that every step of translation the language goes through to get to binary adds bloat to the program. An example would be a subroutine call that in assembly would be written once and then called as needed. In C++ you can attempt to do that but the reality is that it creates 14 separate subroutines for each call that does the same thing instead of just referring to the single subroutine.And that my friends is why most programmers suxxor big time.

It could be legitimate hardware failure. One of the unfortunate problems with computer performance is that any component could be faulty and yet not provide a helpful error code or diagnostic response indicating otherwise. 999 out of 1000 components will work perfectly. It's that one time that it farks up that matters.

sseye: I dont buy this shiat about programmers sucking these days. They always sucked.

As a programmer, I have to say that the line between good and suck is not clearly defined at all.

Even with a single programmer, they could write awesome code on one project, but on another project, write sucky code (for one reason or another, didn't get enough sleep the night before, someone was bothering them while they were writing the code, wife left them, etc).

So the question is, where do you draw the line?

I don't think there's any argument that someone that writes decent code only 10% of the time sucks. But what about 60%, 80%, 90%?

// I personally think a true test of good vs bad programmer is if they can catch themselves writing bad code. IE they write code, come back and look at it the next day and go "WTF was I doing" and then correct it.

// how many dedicated code reviewers do you put on a project. You have dedicated code reviewers don't you? Neither do I, and that sucks :(

Still running my first "real" computer in the music studio - and it boots faster than anything I've had since.

Atari 1040ST. The TOS is in chips on the MoBo so a restart takes a couple of seconds to boot up. Still the best damn MIDI computer going, rock solid timing, not one problem in 26 years! Have gone through a couple of monitors though. The keyboard feel sucks and the mouse is horrible.

skyshooter:Still running my first "real" computer in the music studio - and it boots faster than anything I've had since.

Atari 1040ST. The TOS is in chips on the MoBo so a restart takes a couple of seconds to boot up. Still the best damn MIDI computer going, rock solid timing, not one problem in 26 years! Have gone through a couple of monitors though. The keyboard feel sucks and the mouse is horrible.

I can state categorically that my Windows 7 machine is far faster than any of the previous machines I have built and optimized. Slow operation of any modern computer is the result of the user not knowing how to use and maintain their machine. Instead of googling "how to optimize Windows" and keeping their antivirus updated they wail about the Microsoft devil and are seen in the streets gnashing their teeth.

It doesnt.The biggest jump in speed I remember was from a 286 to 486. I was doing a lot of word processing at the time and it took minutes to change from one page to another with the 286.With the 486 I could change graphical pages as fast as I could hit the button.

The things that seems to give my computer the most hangups are websites that think they have to act like full featured apps.

This. I am tired of websites written in flash with 20 javascript imports. I tire of just poorly written sites, and shiatty underlying technologies. I'm tired of all of the Gawker media hub of sites requiring that you enable javascript just to display their main body text. I'm tired of error checking in form submissions being so broken that valid information has to be reentered. I'm tired of google using the www.google.com domain for captchas instead of using something like apis.google.com, so that my script blocking is even less sane. I detest when password constraints actually enforce poor practices instead of encourage good ones; where hxWoby2$ is a good password, but theysaythestrawthatbrokethecamelsbackwasecma is not. I find of standards and style both of: A) not being well-established B) not being adhered to. The standards bodies have failed, and web development in general is broken from all angles. To those who disagree, I ask why a CSS reset is neccessary. Why is so much vendor-specific and version-specific code neccessary?

As for shiat in general, perhaps if there was less focus on flair and more on performance and maintainability, we might actually be progressing beyond just having games with bigger explosions and videos with more pixels, interface devices just as shoddy as a qwerty keyboard and voice recognition that can understand a bit of klingon but cannot recognize the single syllable english word "no". I pray that one day word suggestion has advanced enough to recognize from context and without manual input that yes, I do mean the word coont, and not cantata. For every single increase in processor cores, hypertransports, front side bus speed, bit depth and resolution, poor practices and the general abuse of the very principle of technology to begin with, to enable and not to hinder ...

mjjtHas anybody ever tried to estimate what proportion of traffic is due just to cookies data going back and forth completely independent of what humans are doing?

Well, cookies is just one of several lines of headers that are transferred each time.There's actually work being done (an aim of HTTP 2.0) to reduce the overhead of headers by compressing them or reducing the statelessness of HTTP (e.g. don't send stuff like the user-agent string with each subsequent request if the server could already "remember" it from your first request).

I guess with all that AJAX and tracking stuff and whatnot doing lots of small requests transferring next to no data, the amount of data being transferred just for overhead(ers) has increased in relation to the amount of actual content.

(The first computer I ever saw was wheeled into my 2nd grade classroom in 1980, a TRS-80 Model 1 or 2 with a reel to reel tape player as an I/O device...The teachers fiddled with it for a long time and couldn't get it to work. When it did finally work, it just did basic math facts.)

1. Bad developers who are using higher level programming languages than they were 20 years ago with no "need" to optimize your code (because you paid for a faster processor).2. Too many running apps (look into your taskbar and at running programs). Ironically the same bad developers decided that their apps ran slightly faster if they were up and running in memory constantly even if it meant they were using the overall memory sub-optimally.3. Rotational disk speeds haven't increased in *forever*. Seriously... 15000 RPM is the fastest most people get who spend a lot of money these days have and this hasn't changed in years. Most home users have a 5400 RPM SATA disk which is incredibly slow. RAID addresses this, but only to a certain extent.

What to do to fix this?

1. Uninstall crap programs you don't use (this is a free speed boost)2. Add more memory (99.9% of the time this makes people think their computer runs like it did the day they bought it). In Windows, if you want an idea of how much memory you use... Leave your computer on and open all the apps you normally do... Leave it on for a few days at least (in case some idiot developer didn't fix a memory leak in their app). Bring up the task manager and look at the performance tab. Read under "Commit Charge (K)" where it says "Peak"... Buy this much RAM and you'll have everything in memory all of the time. -Remember this figure is in Kilobytes.3. Buy a solid state hard drive. -I can't emphasize how much this will help 99.9% of all computer operations. Even if you don't have enough memory, the SSD will make up for that by lowering load times, increasing bandwidth and random read of files from disk. -A lot of people will buy one and replace the hard drive in an old laptop only to think they are using a new laptop.

The above will help with most of what you are looking to do.. The only other upgrade that is worth it is a better video card (but if you need one for gaming or video editing, you already know this, most normal users can get by with on-board video).

buckler:Ponzholio: thejoyofpi: InfamousBLT: I recall tales of one game (I don't remember the name, and I have never played it), but it was a chess game. For some reason, the difficulty of the game increased with the processing power. So, the faster computer you had, the harder the game was.

Apparently it is unplayable on modern computers by anyone except chess geniuses, because they didn't put a cap on the difficulty.

brilliant.

Have you tried to play the original Oregon Trail on a current computer? The end where you have to navigate the river to reach Oregon is f*cking impossible...

I recall a program called MoSlow, which was designed to do nothing more than put a variable load on your CPU, just eating processing cycles. It was designed to overcome just that problem.

DOSBox has a configuration file and everything you need to get all the timing loops to work in an old DOS game is in there.

<b><a href="http://www.fark.com/comments/7207971/78018118#c78018118" target="_blank">lewismarktwo</a>:</b> <i>thiazzi: I stopped complaining when it started to take less time to watch a movie than it did to download it.

thiazzi:<b><a href="http://www.fark.com/comments/7207971/78018118#c78018118" target="_blank">lewismarktwo</a>:</b> <i>thiazzi: I stopped complaining when it started to take less time to watch a movie than it did to download it.

lewismarktwo:thiazzi: <b><a href="http://www.fark.com/comments/7207971/78018118#c78018118" target="_blank">lewismarktwo</a>:</b> <i>thiazzi: I stopped complaining when it started to take less time to watch a movie than it did to download it.

Strike that, reverse it?</i>

You'd rather it take longer to download than to watch?

Been readin and writin long?

While I may fail at HTML replies, I surpass you in reading comprehension.

thiazzi:lewismarktwo: thiazzi: <b><a href="http://www.fark.com/comments/7207971/78018118#c78018118" target="_blank">lewismarktwo</a>:</b> <i>thiazzi: I stopped complaining when it started to take less time to watch a movie than it did to download it.

Strike that, reverse it?</i>

You'd rather it take longer to download than to watch?

Been readin and writin long?

While I may fail at HTML replies, I surpass you in reading comprehension.

Go ahead, blame the person with the least control over what he or she builds. There are high-paid managers who make big, fat, bad decisions in 30 seconds that have more to do with your computer than the minutia developers agonize over for hours while everyone else sleeps.

If it weren't for high-level languages, cross-site scripts, and other hacks that developers usually invent themselves (often in their spare time) just to accomplish the silly things they are asked to do, nobody would have any twitters or facespaces or soundmobs or stacheclouds to instagram to each other.

It's funny - people still blame slow performance on 'it has a gui' logic. Maybe that was true back in the day, but honestly, today most gui's are pretty well optimized as is the hardware used to render them is better.

Operating systems today are decidedly more complex, but they are also doing a lot more than yesteryear. Indexed Searches, Firewall Systems, Fancier User Interfaces, AntiVirus, Encrypted File Systems, Backwards compatibility, Multitasking and Backups to name a few.

If you really want to see how much faster your new hardware is versus your old hardware, try installing Windows 98se on a newer machine. If you can get drivers to work, the speed will be astounding coontil it crashes, that is).

Indexed Searches: Disabled, I know where my files are, I don't need to 'search' for them.

Firewall Systems: Disabled, the custom firmware in my router acts as a firewall (since the router firmware is linux based, and my desktop is linux based, it would be the same thing).

Fancier User Interfaces: GUI = graphical user interface, so on one hand, you're saying people blame it on "it has a GUI", but then in your list, you talk about the user interface?

AntiVirus: Disabled, in my experience, antivirus programs are useless. I'm smart enough not to click on trojans. I install security updates in a timely manner. And for the stuff that there's no security update for, there's often not a signature for the AV programs to latch onto either. IE, the virus that's going to get me is going to be one that's too new for there to be a patch, and too new for the AV programs to detect.

// plus, on access scan is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of and I always had to configure exemptions on my work machine because it would try to scan programs that I compiled.

Encrypted File Systems: not on the home machine

Backwards compatibility: don't know how much of that goes on in the *nix world, on ubuntu, we install stuff compiled for a given version/platform.

Multitasking: but now there are also multi core CPUs

Backups: nope (I manually run my backups, using rsync).

// not the norm// like to tweak every drop of performance out of my machines as possible// I moved my /tmp mount into ram// I have no swap space

MrSteve007:The problem is that your computer doesn't have a "Turbo" button:

From 33 mhz, to a blistering 66 mhz!!!

Lucky you. When I first got my 386, it switched between 8 and 16. Later, 8 and 25. Only after one more upgrade did it switch between 8 and 33. (Changed the LEDs to just say "Hi" and "Lo" at some point just 'cuz.)

Of course, I held onto that case for 4 more years. By the end of its days,I crammed an EISA/VLB server board in that hoss, sporting a 5x86-133 with a whopping 52MB of RAM, and a 3GB SCSI hard drive hooked up via an Adaptec-2740 EISA SCSI card. (Ok, I only owned 32MB of RAM myself, but I borrowed another 20MB from a roommate and a friend while running 15+ hour SPICE simulations for my VLSI class...)

I still twitch when I think about all the hours I stared at that 14" 43Hz interlaced 8bpp display, though...

Why are computers still slow today? A few reasons:

1. They aren't, actually.2. Software companies know #1, though, and know they can lard it up with as much crap as they can until you, the end user, start to complain.3. Some software just sucks.4. All other remaining sources of slowness are probably outside of your computer (eg. crappy servers in teh Interwebs), or maybe something you caught out on the web.

I mean, sure, CPUs are maybe 10,000x faster, RAM's probably 100x faster, and hard drives are easily 10x faster (when seeking), but we're asking them to do quite a bit more than we did before. That 280x192 1bpp Apple ][ screen is a postage stamp on today's 1920x1080 24bpp monitors. Any given icon on your desktop takes up almost as much RAM as that whole display did on that old Apple, in all likelihood.

The first PC I ever used was a 286 running DOS. It doesn't take too much to run a command line interface, text based everything, and 256 color graphics at 640x480 resolution.

It takes quite a bit more to push a full graphical interface with transparent elements at high resolution while running several other programs at once while also maintaining constant connectivity with various outside servers.

If you could manage to run JUST what that first computer did (assuming the OS and programs are even compatible), it would farking FLY.

Someone should do this on speed tests/reviews. It would be fun to see how many fps the new video cards can push Doom or Wolfenstein 3d to.

IIRC, Doom 3 came with old Doom on it, presumably to justify the price tag after you got sick of the game. XD

"When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up.

But now that I am that adult, just this... when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves!

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody somebody a letter... with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take a week to get there!

There were no MP3s or Napsters. If you wanted to steal music you had to go to the farking record store and shoplift it yourself!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn. You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11!

We didn't have any fancy shiat like like Sony Play station videogaes with high res 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600. With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the grpahics sucked. Your guy was a little square. You had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens... it was just one screen forever! Ad you could never win, the gam kept just kept getting harder and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You kids today have got it too easy, you spoiled little bastards! You guys wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes back in 1980!"

P.S. Regarding previous post... I swear there is a Friday the 13th thingie going on with my typing today... also possibly trouble with FARK as they run it through their posting rules?? My apologies for spelling errors... I can spell like the champs but my typing really sucks. I missed that day of school.

guessi'mdoingfine:"When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up.

But now that I am that adult, just this... when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves!

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody somebody a letter... with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take a week to get there!

There were no MP3s or Napsters. If you wanted to steal music you had to go to the farking record store and shoplift it yourself!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn. You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11!

We didn't have any fancy shiat like like Sony Play station videogaes with high res 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600. With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the grpahics sucked. Your guy was a little square. You had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens... it was just one screen forever! Ad you could never win, the gam kept just kept getting harder and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You kids today have got it too easy, you spoiled little bastards! You guys wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes back in 1980!"